


on the way to the bar

by HeyJaybird



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant (Mostly), Character Study, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, i just really love garrus and i feel really bad for romancing him and then dying :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:15:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24316417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeyJaybird/pseuds/HeyJaybird
Summary: The green synthetics are not embedded in skin; they are skin. Mostly they feel like nothing — they sense, like skin, and they rest over his flesh, like skin. Sometimes, though, they feel soft. A near tickle. He wonders if it’s Shepard keeping her promise. That he’d never be alone.The feeling fades, and he knows it isn’t so. The galaxy is empty.---Garrus navigates a new galaxy without Shepard.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21





	on the way to the bar

Once Palaven is restored, once he’s seen his father and his sister, once the dust settles over a newly synthetic galaxy, Garrus understands the meaning of alone.  
Plenty would welcome seeing him again. Tali, Liara, Wrex. Joker and EDI. His father and sister. He misses them, but they pity him. He didn't know Wrex was capable of pity, but he saw it. Wrex had come to Palavan to wrap up the joint turian/krogan task force. It had gone well. Unprecedented peace was expected.  
Somewhere along the way, Wrex must have come to love Eve. Maybe it was the children that made him soft. But Garrus saw it in his eyes, the way he had seen it in the face of the crew of the Normandy. Each race had such different eyes, but pity looked the same in all of them.  
At least on Palaven, they hadn’t really known the nature of his relationship with the commander. He’s not sure how Wrex even found out — Grunt is the most likely suspect. Gossiping soldiers, another constant.  
Everyone loved Shepard, but they don’t look at each other with pity for the loss, because they have other people to love still. They look at Garrus and see an aloneness that could have been theirs, and the fear morphs into pity, and the pity threatens to choke him. So he goes alone.

***

The green synthetics are not embedded in skin; they are skin. Mostly they feel like nothing — they sense, like skin, and they rest over his flesh, like skin. Sometimes, though, they feel soft. A near tickle. He wonders if it’s Shepard keeping her promise. That he’d never be alone.  
The feeling fades, and he knows it isn’t so. The galaxy is empty.

***

Shepard died once. Those two years had the tinge of forever to them as well — he had not known she would come back.  
They were lucky. He knows that. Usually when the love of your life dies before you even get to figure that she is, in fact, the love of your life, you don’t get a second chance. When you go to the biggest shithole in the galaxy and throw yourself at it, try to take a few bad guys down with you before you die, because you can’t figure what you’re around for anymore, she doesn’t come back, just in the nick of time, that weird salarian scientist from the wards and a Cerberus — Cerberus! — operative at her back. She doesn’t pluck you from that foxhole and pluck you from your despair and give you purpose and then, finally, love. Usually she stays dead and then you’re dead and that’s all there ever is.  
But at his most self-pitying, he thinks about how unfair it was to never get to be people. Rather, she never got to be a person, except with the very closest few, the ones to whom Normandy was not just a ship, but home. She was a hero, and heroes do not take long vacations and candlelit dinners and double dates with their friends — he thinks so often of a double date with Joker and EDI because it always makes him smile, if not laugh. She would’ve loved it — she loved them, loved Joker and his joy and the perfect strangeness of their love — and this line of thought always hurts the most, the longest.

***

Garrus was an idiot once — just once? he hears her say — and asked her to create a family on their last day.  
There wasn’t another time. There was never time for those things, and knowing there was no time made him want to say it. She needed to know that he loved her that way too — not just as warriors on the same field, Shepard and Vakarian, the two-man wrecking squad, best friends desperate for a bit of comfort in an unforgiving march to the grave, but loved her enough to argue over where they should buy a house, then buy a house everywhere, near all their friends and in all the places they love. Enough to learn who each other is when their baggage gets lost somewhere between Rannoch and Thessia. Enough to find out who is good cop and who is bad cop when they catch the little ones up in bed still, watching vids of the last stand against the Reapers, delightedly pointing out Mom and Dad and Uncle Wrex and Aunt Liara amidst the rubble. It would be nothing to their children but a story.  
This is how Garrus loves her still. All of these shades of her he glimpsed in the war, like the pale shadow of fish deep under the surface.

***

Each day, Garrus wakes up and doesn’t kill himself.  
Do all species go to the same afterlife? Or does each go to their own, the one they believe in? Can he believe his way to the human one — or is Shepard waiting with the spirits? He doesn’t want to miss her.  
Thane would’ve liked this kind of conversation. Garrus thinks of him now more than he ever did when the drell was alive. Thane lost his wife and died for years, before the Kreplar’s began he was dying.  
Thane had a son. Even Thane was not as alone as Garrus is.

***

Garrus wanders the galaxy looking for a sign. He doesn’t know what it would be, but he’ll know it when he sees it. He doesn’t know what it will even be of — that there’s an afterlife? That she’s watching him beyond? Or that she’s alive? The hope is inauthentic. There is no Illusive Man to raise the dead. There is no body to bring back.  
He hopes she’s truly dead, not soulbound to some impossible to fathom technology where she will always be and he will never reach. This hope is authentic. He wakes up each day looking for a sign that she is somewhere he will reach. Only then will he go.

***

Thedas is a small garden planet, the kind of place the Reapers might have spared this cycle for their lack of technology. It’s fascinating in three ways:  
The convergent evolution of humanity  
The multitude of species existing on a single planet before interstellar travel  
The nature of biotics in these populations, which are unlike those anywhere else in the galaxy  
After the synthesis, they became aware of many things they would not have been prepared for, if not for the synthesis. It is the poison and the antidote all in one for these people, who had not even developed electricity.  
This is a special place, though there is no discernible reason for it. Shepard was a special person, and he could list all the ways forever, he will list all the ways forever, but there was no reason. She was an Earth orphan who escaped to the stars. A beautiful and common story. He comes here in usual state of half expectation.  
He drinks. The alcohol is fine here. It is always fine.  
The locals are still fascinated by aliens. Organics have retained so much of themselves that he thinks they could’ve had this peace all along, just as they were, without all the loss. Their curiosity beats at the edges of of his perception, but they do not speak. Here, at least, in this shitty pub on a backwater planet, he is not —  
“Garrus Vakarian.”  
His hand is at his gun, though he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t recognize the voice, there is no anger in it — it’s reverent. The only thing he hates worse than the pity. The honor from strangers.  
He turns. The man is small, broad, with a light hair and a deeply unbuttoned shirt. Nearly human, but not quite.  
“Varric Tethras. Let me buy you a drink.”  
"You really don’t have to —“  
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.”  
“Get me drunk to hear some war stories?” Garrus says bitterly. He’s done it before, when he misses the feeling of drinking and telling stories with friends. His friends are very far from him now.  
“I don’t know how much it takes to get you people drunk. The qunari taught me not to bother with people whose limits I don’t know.”  
“What then?”  
“I know the story of Shepard. It’s…familiar.”  
Garrus doesn’t say anything, but he looks the man dead on. That’s a bold claim, but Varric’s gaze holds. He believes what he has said.  
“I’m a fine listener, but I’m more a storyteller myself. I’m sure you haven’t heard of the Champion of Kirkwall out there in space.”  
Garrus sees it then. The same pain. He’s found something. He can’t tell if it’s his sign, but it's something.  
“Tell me,” he says.  
“Hawke,” Varric says, and his voice is so deep and empty that Garrus almost loses himself in it, the way two drops of water get too close and become one. If he stays and listens to this man, his identical pain, he may not ever know where one grief ends and the other begins again.  
Garrus listens to the tale of the champion.

***

The next something happens on Earth. He goes there specifically so something will happen, and it only takes four tries for it to manifest.  
There’s Jacob, who was kind, even if he was Ceberus, and he's already seen Garrus, so he has no choice but to speak with him. He must be the something, even if Garrus doesn't know why.  
“I had a place. I was going to take Shepard. Maybe you’d like it?”  
Garrus does not think he will, but it seems important to Jacob. This could be Jacob’s moment, the one that sets him free, makes it all make sense. Garrus envies him. To only need one moment to orient everything that’s happened, to seal the grief away.  
Garrus goes because Shepard would go, even if she didn’t want to. She’d do it at the slightest chance of helping someone. And people knew she would do anything for them, never turned anyone away, how could one human being do so much — she should not have been able to. She should not have been asked to. He misses her so much he can hardly think, just lets Jacob lead him to a bar in Rio. Some part of him knows he can’t die of grief but every time this happens he becomes less sure.  
“What’ll you have?” Jacob asks. The fact that both of his moments have happened in bars strikes him, grounds him. He should only go to bars now. He stops the words of the thought before it finishes, but the idea is already there.  
“Surprise me,” he says.  
Jacob orders two of the same and hands Garrus a bottle. Something sweet and dry. He’s never had it, but he likes it.  
“Impossible to get cider off planet,” Jacob says.  
“It’s nice.” Garrus knows he isn’t himself. He waits for the pity to flash in Jacob’s eyes when he realizes this is all that's left. He wonders if Shepard liked this cider, realizes he will never know, and breaks into sobs, crying like it will make a difference.  
The bar is entirely humans, but the synthesis renders suspicion a history. They eye him with pity, not fear.  
Jacob is steady, as always.  
“Come on,” he says, pulling Garrus up by the elbow, and the body of Garrus complies.  
Movement helps. He’s crying quietly by the time they cross the threshold. Jacob leads him into what counts for a crowd now.  
“I’m sorry,” Garrus says, breathing deeply. He can’t place the smells of Earth, but they’re not all bad.  
“Don’t be,” Jacob says. “I miss her too.”  
Saying Garrus misses Shepard is like saying an insect stripped of its wings misses flying.  
“I know it’s not the same,” Jacob says. Garrus would blame the synthetic connection of all things, but Jacob’s always intuited people well. “But it doesn’t have to be.”  
The knowledge that he is alive, actually alive, in possession still of a life, nearly brings Garrus to his knees. It’s not the same life, but it doesn’t have to be. He does not expect it to be a better life, but it can be a life.

***

A few years ago, Tuchanka would never have parted with one of its daughters, much less to a turian, but there are many krogan now. The story of her orphanhood is sadder for its simplicity; no parents lost in the war, just a bad shuttle wreck. Garrus forgot people still died like that, an abrupt rupture in the normal. He knows Shepard was an orphan too, but he can’t remember how her parents died. She must have told him. It’ll be in any of the biographies, but he wants to ask her. He wants so badly to just ask her, it’s such an easy detail to know, he should be able to turn around and ask her — he nearly screams when Wrex appears at his shoulder with arms full of blanket and child. Garrus can’t tell if the soft blankets are a joke,.  
“I’m having a krogan crib sent to your ship,” he says. “You don’t want to see what she’d do to anything else.”

***

Their daughter has her mother’s name, but not Shepard — the other name. The one that even he rarely called her, and now he’s not sure why. Because it felt too intimate? Why would he be scared of something like that? It must have made sense then.  
There are so many children named Shepard. A few, mostly humans, have the other name. He hasn’t met any krogan with the name.  
Their daughter. She is the one being in the galaxy who did not meet Shepard, but knows her beyond the commander. To her, she is Mom, who died before she was born and loved her. Not to be confused with Mama, the krogan mother who died just after she was born and loved her too. Their daughter has three dead parents and one living. He hopes being raised by all those ghosts won’t be too hard on her.

***

Their daughter is like her mother in so many ways. Not just the things she could pick up from the biographies and the vids, or the things that Garrus tells her in stories — she has her dignity, her seemingly effortless rightness, her righteousness. Their daughter saves the lives of stranded insects and broken mammals and tries diplomacy with the neighborhood bullies. When diplomacy doesn’t work, she throws herself at them with all the rage in her armored body. When they give up, she backs off — restraint Garrus has never seen in a krogran.  
Now when people see him, it’s either confusion or joy or both in their eyes. He can understand. She is young, but krogan age quickly, and she’s nearing his height every day. She is often solemn, then comes up with the funniest line in the room. Garrus hopes she doesn’t want to be a soldier. Her first parents were civilians, so there’s hope for her yet. But when she barks commands and everyone listens, as if compelled, Garrus decides not to bet on it.  
The afterlife allows her to help raise her daughter. It seems kind. He might find her there after all.

***

All children should outlive their parents, but their daughter will live for hundreds, maybe thousands of years after them. When future generations want to know what Shepard was like, really like, all they have to do is look to her daughter.

***

Garrus’ daughter is by his side when he dies, an old turian. She doesn’t cry.  
“Thank you for everything,” she says.  
He wants to tell her to share her pain and her joy more freely, that she can cry in front of him, that she is a person and not a construct, but these are not the lessons that she needs. And if they are one day, she can find them herself. She has the luxury of time her mother never had.  
“It was the joy of my life,” he says. “I love you.”  
“I love you too.”  
Garrus does not linger much longer. He sees a woman at a bar, sitting next an empty chair and waiting drink. They have much to catch up on. 

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, glad I got that out of my system! 
> 
> This was supposed to be a fix it fic, but I really like the ending even if it does make me very sad. So the closest I could get was really leaning in to that one convo before the last mission which hit me really hard.
> 
> Also, realizing I could just put Varric in this and no one could stop me was a really powerful feeling. If you're excited about DA/ME crossovers, you're absolutely my audience hi!
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
